Mainstreaming the Sweden Democrats - mapping changes and continuities in party ideology 1989-2019 through discourse analysis

Abstract: Much academic literature has explained the success of radical right parties across Europe in the last few decades through the increased importance of the sociocultural, conceptualised as the GAL-TAN, or libertarian-authoritarian, scale. The late rise of the Sweden Democrats, long considered an exception to the rule, as a successful radical right party, has attracted some academic interest and various explanations on what may have caused this sudden success. This study looks at discursive changes happening in the party programs (principprogram) 1989- 2019, especially in the context of mainstreaming/moderation of ideology, using discourse analysis with reference to literature on supply and demand factors for radical right success. The study also looks at continuities in the program, to explore to what extent the Sweden Democrats can be considered a typical TAN-party, that has reached success by being the only sociocultural-authoritarian party in Swedish politics. The results show significant ideological flexibility which can be interpreted as a supply-side factor for party success, and which points to problems with the GAL-TAN scale in the case of the Sweden Democrats, in the sense that there is too much movement happening on the sociocultural dimension for the party to be pinned down, and such conceptualisation overlooks the creative ways in which the ideology builds on successful mainstream discourses to construct Swedishness in a way that is acceptable for the electorate. The identified continuities reinforce the entanglement with mainstream discourse and incompatibility with the GAL-TAN scale through the identified centrality of the local concepts ‘trygghet’ and the people’s home (Folkhem).